Guides

A guestbook on Neocities

How to add a guestbook to a free Neocities site

Neocities calls itself a home for handmade websites, and a handmade website deserves a guestbook. This guide puts an UltraGuest guestbook on a free Neocities site, inside your own page or as a link: no Supporter plan, no programming and nothing to pay. It also says plainly what the guestbook does not do, so there are no surprises later.

Why a Neocities site needs a hosted guestbook

Neocities offers free static web hosting. Your site is the files you upload (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images), and Neocities serves them to your visitors as they are: there is no server-side code and no database. A guestbook needs both, because something has to receive a visitor's message, keep it and show it to the next visitor. So the guestbook lives on another service, and your page shows it or links to it.

A free site also has a stricter content security policy than a Supporter site: neocities.org lists a less strict policy, one that lets your scripts connect to other servers, among the features of the $5-a-month Supporter plan. On a new free site, the policy Neocities sends with your pages stops a script from fetching data from another server and a form from sending to another site, which is how most guestbook widgets work. It does allow a frame that shows a page from another site, and a plain link is ordinary HTML that the policy does not touch. UltraGuest offers both, and neither needs the Supporter plan.

1. Sign up

Open the signup form, enter your e-mail address and a password, pass the human check and click "Create guestbook". Your first guestbook is created with your account, and one login can hold up to ten.

2. Confirm your e-mail address

We send you a link; click it within seven days. Until you do, the guestbook takes no messages and the frame on your page only says that the guestbook is not available, so look in your spam folder if the mail has not arrived after a few minutes. Then log in to the Control Panel.

3. Find your guestbook's address

Every guestbook has an address of its own. A new one gets a short code of letters and digits, such as ultraguest.com/view/k7m2q9xp, and Account › Link Code shows yours inside the HTML you copy. If you would rather have a name, Account › Guestbook Address lets you choose one of 3 to 30 characters (lower-case letters, digits and hyphens), which is checked before it is saved. The code keeps working and leads to the name, so nothing you have already pasted stops working.

4. Put it on your page

Account › Link Code has three tabs. The first, On your page, is the embed: a frame that shows your guestbook's newest public messages inside your own page. This is the code it gives you, with your guestbook's address where this copy says YOUR-ADDRESS:

<!-- UltraGuest guestbook -->
<iframe src="https://www.ultraguest.com/embed/YOUR-ADDRESS" title="Guestbook" width="100%" height="420" style="border:1px solid #ccc;border-radius:6px;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"></iframe>

On Neocities, open your site's dashboard and edit the page the guestbook belongs on: your index.html, or a new file such as guestbook.html, which becomes a page you can link to. Paste the code where the guestbook should appear, save, and open the page.

Rather have a link, in a menu or as a button? The View Guestbook and Sign Guestbook tabs give you one each. This is the first, which opens the guestbook as a page of its own:

<!-- UltraGuest HTML Code Start -->
<center>
[ <a href="https://www.ultraguest.com/view/YOUR-ADDRESS">View Guestbook</a> ]
<br><a href="https://www.ultraguest.com"><font size="1">Free Guestbook by UltraGuest.com</font></a>
</center>
<!-- UltraGuest HTML Code End -->

Both are plain HTML, so change the text, the styling or the credit line as you like. You can also use both: the frame on your home page and a link in your menu.

5. Make it look like your site

Under Settings › Guestbook Options, give the guestbook a title and put your site's full address, such as https://yoursitename.neocities.org, in Homepage URL: the guestbook's own page then links back to your site. In the snippet, change height="420" to suit your page. Add ?n=5 to the address after /embed/YOUR-ADDRESS to show five messages instead of ten (anything from three to fifty), or ?style=mine to use the colours you set under Design › Colors and Style; the two combine as ?n=5&style=mine.

The guestbook's own page takes those colours too, plus a font, a font size and a background image, with a live preview. Design › Guestbook Header puts your own text or HTML at the top of it, and Design › Edit CSS replaces its whole stylesheet with yours, so it can have your site's look. The customize page has the details.

6. Moderation and notifications

You do not have to set anything up to keep junk out. Every post passes a Cloudflare Turnstile check, a message containing an http:// or https:// link is refused, and every message is read by AI moderation, in the context of your guestbook, before it appears; the moderation guide describes the rest. If you want the last word yourself, tick Approve new messages under Settings › Guestbook Options, and new messages wait until you approve them. The same page has a word filter, and the message list has a "Block IP" link next to every message.

New messages are e-mailed to you from the start: up to five a day as they arrive, the rest together in one daily summary, each with a link to approve or hide the message without logging in (it works once, for 14 days). Settings › Email Notification changes what you hear about.

What to know before you start

  • The frame shows your newest public messages: ten by default, fifty at most. Private messages and messages waiting for approval never appear in it, and every public message is on the guestbook's own page.
  • A new message can take a few minutes to reach the frame, because a copy of the frame may be kept for up to five minutes.
  • Search engines list the guestbook's own page, not the frame. The frame asks not to be indexed, so its messages do not count as text on your Neocities page.
  • It lives at ultraguest.com. Your visitors' browsers load the frame from our server, as with anything embedded, and the snippet's referrerpolicy="no-referrer" keeps them from telling us which page it is on; the privacy policy says what we keep. Since the messages are not on your own site, keep a copy now and then with Account › Download My Data (JSON or CSV).
  • Messages are plain text of up to 1,500 characters, with smilies and simple formatting, but no HTML, no links and no uploaded pictures.

Questions? The FAQ has short answers, the embed page shows a live frame of our demo guestbook, and guestbooks for Neocities compares the options people use there. Not on UltraGuest yet? Sign up for free.

The Neocities details were read on neocities.org (its home, about, Supporter and tutorial pages) and in the content security policy Neocities sends with a free site, in September 2026; please check there for current details. UltraGuest is not affiliated with Neocities.